Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 6 Dec 2012 15:20:44 +0100 | From | Jan Kara <> | Subject | Re: backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy even though swap is unused |
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On Sun 25-11-12 21:30:00, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote: > On Sun, 2012-11-25 at 15:55 +0200, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote: > > on an old PIII-500MHz laptop, 128MB RAM, kernel 3.6.6, I started a > > backup process (tar|xz -4, nice'd and ionice'd -c3) from ext4 on local > > ATA disk to ext3 on external USB disk (USB-2.0 port on PCMCIA card). > > Even though earlier system load was minimal, free memory was plenty, the > > system now is unresponsive and is thrashing the disk, but the swapfile > > is rarely touched. > > I'm now having the same experience even though I replaced xz (which > needed ~50MB RAM) with gzip. Even though I feel the realtime root shell > is a bit more responsive than before, the OOM killer is out killing > small processes like syslog-ng and systemd-logind... The > ext4_inode_cache slab is taking almost all my memory (117MB). Please > advise! Hmm, it seems commit 4eff96dd5283a102e0c1cac95247090be74a38ed might be interesting for you. It landed in -stable kernels recently as well if I remember right...
Honza
-- Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> SUSE Labs, CR
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